I research, write about innovation, privacy and reputation via my books and articles, and work on it with clients as president of Arcadia, a communications research, design & delivery lab focused on today's most important, cutting-edge issues. I have 30+ years of professional experience working at big ad/PR agencies and at major brands, and I'm a Senior Fellow Emeritus at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.

The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer.

Why We Need NASA To Fix Its Problems And Lead America To Money-Making Opportunities in Outer Space

A bunch of tech wonks and nerds issued a report last week that provided a shockingly accurate conclusion about NASA’s Strategic Plan: it’s vague, generic, and there’s no national consensus for taxpayer support. Now it’s time for the agency to look beyond its comfy fishbowl of geeks and contractors to fix its problem.

No, it’s been time for many years, and the Committee on NASA’s Strategic Direction said as much. NASA was hatched from a handful of bureaucracies in the late 1950s to get Americans into space faster than the Soviets, and the first Moon landing in 1969 completed that mission brilliantly. Our eyes have glazed over since then, unless things have gone wrong with its shuttles, the ISS, and various unmanned probes nominally launched in the pursuit of science, but really investments in keeping itself in business.

It takes skill to turn the Ultimate Adventure into a bureaucratic afterthought.

Exploration didn’t used to be so boring. Monarchs and consortia of the rich or foolhardy have been putting up money for voyages of discovery since the beginning of time, though by “discovery” they meant “discover profits.” It’s how the New World was explored and exploited, and it enabled the Westward expansion of the United States. Sure, scientists tagged along on many of the gigs, but the governments were foremost interested in making money.

It’s how the exploration business works: governments pave the way (with knowledge gained through building roads, rail, and ships) and then the rest of us literally jump on the, er, bandwagon. This bringing together of national and individual lust for wealth has been the engine of exploration for all of history.

It’s how it has worked here since President Jefferson sent Lewis & Clark into the wilderness to find a waterway to ship goods. Eisenhower’s national highway system made possible everything from transporting fresh produce to the social mobility of suburban living. The Defense Department gave us what would become the Internet.

NASA has given us billions of dollars in expenditure on stuff we either don’t know or care about. Satellites help me text and watch VOD, but satellites were getting thrown into orbit before President Kennedy announced we were going to the Moon. Miniaturized electronics are a nice Apollo Program offshoot, but byproducts aren’t the same thing as named deliverables.

What needs to happen? NASA has to stop talking to itself. The folks on that committee have been drinking the Tang for too long. The agency is the Microsoft of exploration, and it’s time for it to start thinking like Apple and declare big, high/risk and high/reward goals like explorers did in the past, such as:

Start selling rights to develop low orbit commercial opportunities

If there’s stuff worth doing on the Moon, help make it happen

Solve the damn energy problem with solar power from space (duh)

Did you know that last year NASA announced that it would land spacecraft on asteroids and figure out how to go to Mars (Curiosity is already trolling there for the best real estate)? I know, the news was kept practically secret, perhaps in part because nobody bothered to explain why it was so incomprehensibly cool and promising. NASA also unveiled a new heavy-lift rocket design to get people there, and named it…wait for it…SLS. Not Andromeda or New Hope or whatever.

No wonder virtual reality is more enticing to people these days. NASA gives its rockets acronym names like they’re line items in a budget (which they are). Or diseases.

Why are well-intentioned bureaucrats narrating these adventures in reality instead of folks who know how to sell stuff? We marketers know how to get people excited about shoes and smartphone apps. Do we really think that America’s Ultimate Adventure is inherently doomed to be ignored or misunderstood?

The real point isn’t that NASA needs a purpose, it’s that we need NASA. There are few industries and domains that the United States owns, but we own far more of space exploration than we do, say, entertainment. It’s a source of national competitive advantage for us, and no amount of private space tourism shenanigans can take its place. Finding money-making opportunities in outer space is something every American taxpayer could support if we understood why we’d all benefit.

We need NASA to become the engine for getting thousands of other companies, institutions, and individuals involved in space exploration and development. Making money should be the literal currency for achieving that purpose, which will spin-off all the science and social benefits that every other exploration initiative has yielded throughout history.

Everyone knows the problem. The solution is obvious. No more studies or committees.

It’s time to launch.

UPDATE 01.14.13: The latest news about China’s agressive space program efforts suggest that the national security rationale for our work hasn’t faded? Surprising that we hear so little about it.

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I’ll go further than just the financial aspect; it’s one of the things that we really haven’t seen since JFK, setting a goal with NASA gives this country a purpose, something to strive for and take pride in. This country and our government are floundering and we blame each other and circumstances, but in truth we are like any family who has an income; maybe even a budget, but we don’t have any goals. I know there are those who will say balancing the budget and ending our troops time in the Middle East and Health Care: These things are house keeping items that are part of the budget. What America are we working for, what are we working towards, how do we want this country to be remembered? For being the first country to reach the moon or that we were able to make a payment on our loans a couple of times this decade?

Kevin, you make a profoundly important point. The United States has always had a national purpose (or purposes), and it/one of them was always this perspective that we were reaching toward a better tomorrow. Call if Manifest Destiny or simply the truths embedded in the Declaration of Independence, but we’ve always been strivers, not just adjusters.

The great contribution to humanity that the Apollo program gave us was Teflon? How blatantly ignorant of simple facts can someone be?

Want to know what the problem is with NASA, it is congress. It can be boiled down to NASA spending a $500 million mobile launch tower for the cancelled Ares I rocket. Congress loved the millions going into Flordia to create jobs.

NASA also invested $500 million in SpaceX. SpaceX also invested $500 million. So for $1 billion. SpaceX developed 2 new rockets, 4 new rocket motors, 1 new space capsule and launched a couple of test flights. Not too bad but congress has tried to shut this program down.

Congress approved the Constellation Program spent over $10 billion and had nothing but delays and cost over runs. Obama put it out of it’s misery and cancelled it in favor of a new approach like SpaceX.

It would be obvious to a 6 year old that the SpaceX approach was very cost effective and also delivered real results. So what does congress do? It isn’t what would be obvious to a 6 year old. Let use the heavy lift rocket as an example.

NASA needs a heavy lift rocket. OPTION #1 – SLS – puts 70 tons into orbit, will cost billions to develop, $500 per launch and will be ready in 2018. SpaceX’s 52 ton Falcon Heavy rocket costs tax payers $0 to develop, $125 million per launch and will be ready in 2014. A 6 year old could make this decision in 5 seconds. But what does congress choose?

Why of course the most expensive solution that directs the most pork to their state! How it that the right decision for America? Congress people claim they are opposed to SpaceX over vague safety issues. I guess paper rocket that never fly but cost 10′s of billions are always going to be safer then real rockets that actually fly to space. Humm, let’s ask a 6 year old if that is a valid argument.

Until congress stops using NASA as a popular jobs program we’re never going to do anything exciting in space again without it cost trillions.

Also please get your head out of your $@X*. The need to save weight with the electronics in the Apollo rockets was the driving force that created the miniaturization of electronics that sparked the technology revolution that caused America to be at the forefront of technology. It wasn’t a direct result but the natural progression of the seed Apollo technology.

Philly Jimi, your comments are substantive and evidence of the very problem I hope NASA can overcome. It really isn’t about digging up proof points for why the science of space contributed to our lives — it’s a fact that I readily and happily give — but rather that any exploration effort, coming from any country in any time or place, requires that its proponents make its benefits overwhelmingly clear to its supporters. The investors in the Hudson Bay Co. had no problem understanding how their money was being put to use, for instance.

In business we have a saying “the customer is always right.” In this instance, “the customer” is the American taxpayer and NASA/our government have done a poor job of both understanding and then delivering on a purpose (ever since landing on the Moon, in my opinion). I have more faith than you that our leadership can figure this out and, when they do, we of the taxpaying public can get behind them…because we’ll see that it’s in our own self-interest. Your example of the miniaturization of electronics components as a beneficial offshoot of the Apollo Program is a great example. Just imagine if it had been a stated, participatory, and tracked extension. There are huge opportunities in this regard.

Thanks for the clarification. Satellites certainly existed before Kennedy, and satellites make possible such global data services as texting and VOD (tho they’re enabled by earth-bound technologies also). I certainly thought that Teflon came from NASA but a quickie Wiki check confirms my mistake.

This all serves to confirm my bigger point, which is here we are trading fact-checking on things instead of uniting in an affirmation of NASA’s greater purpose and our support thereof.